From the Salmon

There’s nothing inherently special about a fourth anniversary. It’s not any more significant than the third anniversary or the fifth. Except that in our US democracy, we’re accustomed to offering a referendum on our presidents every four years.

Maybe that’s why this fourth observance of the tragic attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, has made me want to look back with an eye towards assessing how we’ve responded in the years that followed: Have we used the resources of American power wisely in countering the groups and the ideology that fueled the horrendous attacks on that day? Are we stronger or weaker? Safer or more at risk?

I’d started to organize my thoughts in order to write a fairly lengthy post on this when I came across Mark Danner’s ”Taking Stock of the Forever War” in today’s New York Times. A few paragraphs in, I put away the thought of writing a post of my own. Danner says most of what I would have and then some. It’s long, but it’s worth reading, even if you print it out and read it over the course of this next week. Do so and come back to talk about it.

For someone who has read about and studied politics and foreign policy as much as I have, I’ve written surprisingly little about what I think over the last several months. That’s largely because most of what I would write right now would be from a place of anger. And if you’ve visited this site over the past few weeks, you know that I’m trying to sort out the proper place for anger in what I hope might be a better model for discussion. On the flip side of that, though, I’m not sure it’s right that I avoid that which interests me and that about which I feel strongly, simply because it makes me angry.

I actually hoped to write a post this weekend furthering the recent discussion we’ve had on the ethics of outrage. Instead, you get just straight up outrage. And I hope I’m not throwing the rest of that out the window at the same time.

I’m sure this has been clear between the lines of what I’ve written so far, but I may as well come out and say it. I have very little faith, trust or confidence in President Bush and his administration, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. How I’ve come to this point is significantly more complex than this, but for the sake of this post, let me say that the crystalizing example of why this is true for me is Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

I believe that the decision to invade Iraq was driven by ideology, constrained by political expediency, and executed with hubris and a willful disregard for the likely consequences.

That’s a strong statement, but I don’t think it’s unfair. And Danner’s extensive indictment bears it out. How are we doing in the “Global War on Terror”?

Four years after we watched the towers fall, Americans have not succeeded in “ridding the world of evil.” We have managed to show ourselves, our friends and most of all our enemies the limits of American power. Instead of fighting the real war that was thrust upon us on that incomprehensible morning four years ago, we stubbornly insisted on fighting a war of the imagination, an ideological struggle that we defined not by frankly appraising the real enemy before us but by focusing on the mirror of our own obsessions. And we have finished — as the escalating numbers of terrorist attacks, the grinding Iraq insurgency, the overstretched American military and the increasing political dissatisfaction at home show — by fighting precisely the kind of war they wanted us to fight.

This is not a war we needed to fight. This was a war we chose to fight. And to justify its ability to fight this war, the Bush administration put limitations on its plan that essentially guaranteed the chaos that we find ourselves facing today.

In a world where projected strength is perhaps the most important element of foreign and military policy, our venture in Iraq has exposed actual American weakness. It has overtaxed our military in ways that will take years to repair. It has added hundreds of billions of dollars to an already balooning budget deficit. It has put severe limitations on our foreign policy options, particularly in Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, which hold greater potential threats than Iraq ever did. It has led to a profound decline of American moral authority.

Worst of all, we’re further from our objectives in the “Global War on Terror” now than we would have been had we never invaded. In Afghanistan, we had initially crippled bin Laden’s organization, razed his training grounds, and frustrated his desire to incite us into an intractable war against a guerilla insurgency of the kind that had bested another global superpower in decades past. By invading Iraq in the manner we did, we gave a new generation of terrorists a place to train and provided bin Laden and others with precisely the intractable conflict they desired as a recruiting tool and an organizing point for their horrific ideology.

I could go on, but I’d rather that you spent your time reading Danner’s piece. I’m not sure I agree with absolutely everything he says, but there’s a lot in there that I’d love to discuss, even if you disagree strongly, as I have no doubt some of you do.

But let me close with this: I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that invading Iraq has been the single biggest US foreign policy mistake of the last 20 years. And this administration has not been held accountable. In fact, they were reelected.

Have we used our resources wisely in response to 9/11? No.

Are we stronger? No. Safer? I don’t think so.

Am I angry about it? Yes.